As Primaries Go North, Campaign Has New Scent

March 15, 1992|By Steve Daley.

While Bill Clinton was buttering up the mayor of Chicago last week, Paul Tsongas was in a full-court whine. The formerly feisty man from Massachusetts has been mewling and complaining ever since the Clinton campaign began boxing his ears on the issues down in Georgia and Florida.

Clinton and Tsongas are in Illinois and Michigan now, with presidential primaries set for Tuesday, and St. Paul is acting like a candidate who can`t take a pinch.

His rival, meanwhile, has for the moment abandoned his role as the voice of the new politics. Clinton`s new voice sounds a lot like Huey Long.

There was a time when the Arkansas governor insisted that he wasn`t interested in assigning blame for America`s travails. That brand of brain-dead politics, as Clinton called it, was best left to the Republicans and to the Tom Harkins of the Democratic Party.

That was then; this is a Democratic primary in a large Northern industrial state.

Now, Wall Street is the problem, Clinton says. Or rather, Wall Street is Tsongas` problem. Reaganomics and trickle-down economic theory are the curse of the Tsongas campaign, or so Clinton would have you believe. Certainly that`s the message of the Clinton TV ads, the message that has his opponent in a dither.

Tsongas is mad enough to peddle the line that departed Democrats like Sens. Harkin of Iowa and Bob Kerrey of Nebraska have marketed: Bill Clinton, an imperfect vessel, just isn`t electable in 1992.

Suddenly, this whole business is taking on the air of a political campaign.

If you were paying attention to the Democratic campaign six weeks ago-and we know you weren`t-the tone was a trifle different.

Back in New Hampshire, the Democratic campaign was a more or less civilized affair. The candidates sounded like a handful of assistant professors who`d rented a conference room at an airport Hilton to talk about the Big Issues.

Health care was the specialty of the house, and if you couldn`t discuss the vagaries of managed care and the single-payer system, you weren`t likely to get into the lightning round.

Before the voting started, the Democrats agreed that George Bush was the problem, and the crosstalk among the candidates was as friendly as dinnertime at Ozzie Nelson`s house: Hi, Bill; Hi, Paul; Hi, Bob; Hi, Tom.

Then the balloting commenced and the field began to winnow, in the parlance of the political writer. Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder disappeared first, and the candidacies of Kerrey and Harkin revealed their shortcomings.

Former California Gov. Jerry Brown, understanding that the defenseless Democratic Party was the perfect vehicle for engineering a third-party campaign, did just that.

His anti-politics message is thriving in neighborhoods where people listen to National Public Radio`s ``All Things Considered`` and don`t watch the Super Bowl.

All three Democrats have undergone transformations along the campaign trail, at least in their rhetoric.

Clinton developed a taste for special-interest politics down in Florida, where he cornered Tsongas with questions about tampering with Social Security benefits and about his commitment to Israel, mighty big issues in that state. Tsongas became obsessed with Clinton, which is understandable, since this is shaping up as a two-man race.

But the man who said his campaign was centered on purpose rather than politics has spent an inordinate amount of time and energy comparing himself to his old friend and fellow Greek-American Michael Dukakis.

It turns out that Tsongas is from the Mario Cuomo school of overreaction. He possesses what the starting nine of his beloved Boston Red Sox would call ``rabbit ears.``

In Tsongas` world, every criticism is a personal attack. Every mention of his record or his oft-stated position on an issue reflects either negative politics or a veiled ethnic slur.

Down in Florida, when Clinton argued that his rival`s opposition to a modest middle-class tax cut was ``not American,`` for example, he was talking about a rhetorical concept of fairness that a 7th grader could understand.

By Tsongas` lights, the other guy was playing rough, trafficking in ethnic buzzwords that touched chords in Clinton`s native South.

The thinning of Tsongas` skin is probably a result of the inevitable links to Dukakis, whose passive response to Republican attack four years ago is the lingering, melancholy legacy of his presidential campaign.

But the fact is, the Clinton-Tsongas showdown looks and feels nasty because it was so relentlessly collegial at the beginning.

Now that the campaign has made its way to a place where the fight doesn`t start until the first sucker punch is thrown, maybe the Democrats will quit whining and get on with it.